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Imagine you run a toyshop. You have to sell a consignment  of 'white' Barbie dolls and 'black' Barbie dolls.

Should you price them at the same rate under all circumstances to show that, you know, all races are equal?

Does selling the black one at a cheaper price send a bad racial signal?

Or does it encourage white parents to buy black Barbies for their offspring, spreading racial harmony?

Does selling the black one at a higher price send a signal that you do not care about poorer black customers?

Aaargh.

Is one argument against using unmanned predators to attack enemy targets that they are just too accurate?

How about this other one: if eg the USA does not have to go through battle processes by putting troops in danger on the ground as in medievel times, that is either unfair or makes it too 'easy' for the USA to wage war?

Suggesting, however sophisticated the language, that superior intellects understand that “we” need to have more American GIs killed, or at risk, in order to reach the efficient equilibrium of incentives and disincentives to violence is not a winning argument.

I also think, however, that the folks inclined to make this kind of argument cannot restrain themselves from making it, because it lies at the heart of what they truly think, while also confirming both their morally superior position of “neutrality” and their intellectual superiority, too, and all the rest is merely a minor add-on.  If I sound offended by it, I am.

Me too.

Under the Lisbon Treaty the European Union has a new External Action Service, led by Baroness Ashton.

And as expected, it is struggling to trundle out of the hangar and get on the runway.

The main issue in the arguments over setting up the EAS is not all about how the EU might best throw its weight around in the world.

No! Much more important matters principles are at stake. Namely:

• who gets which top jobs?
• who decides?

In one early and much criticised power-play, probably the most important overseas job in the EAS went to ... a close colleague of Commission President Barroso, who was bundled through by Barroso before the EAS was properly set up. Many Europhiles see this as at best unseemly:

The fear is that the appointment of a Portuguese official, formerly Barroso’s chef de cabinet smacks of patronage and inappropriate influence. 

Not an inspired move, if the aim is to make the EU effective?

Since then there has been the long anticipated three-way struggle between member states (keen to get EAS defined and run in such a way as to pose no threat to national foreign ministries), the European Parliament (ever scheming to extend its power) and the Commission (having hundreds of people previously serving at Commission 'representations' overseas who need placing).

Behind all that are key European policy competences. Who leads and sets the overall agenda? The Commission, the Parliament, or Member States?

Zzzz.

Meanwhile Cathy Ashton too is being attacked openly from various quarters (including France) for being 'just not up to the job'. Although some of the examples cited are a bit strange:

... some experienced EU officials say she would have done better to have waited two months in order to learn the ropes from Mr Solana and his team.

“She hasn’t had the tools she needs. When Haiti hit, she did not even have a television in her office,” said Alexander Stubb, Finland’s foreign minister.

Huh?

Good. The last thing she needs is tedious 24/7 media propaganda flickering away distractingly in the corner.

Nor should she have rushed to Haiti to 'see for herself' the earthquake devastation there. Trips like that are basically do-something resource-intensive self-indulgence by the leaders concerned.

Maybe patiently plodding along is the inglorious but overall best available approach.

In short, all going just as I predicted.

Sarajevo's Dnevni Avaz reports that the Bosniac member of the three-person Bosnian collective state Presidency, Haris Silajdzic, is travelling to London to visit Ejup Ganic tomorrow - presumably in jail. The office of the Serb member of the Presidency Nebojsa Radmanovic mournfully complains that he still has not been informed.

This (if it happens) has to be an extraordinary first in the Diplomatic History of the Universe - a head of state visiting another state specifically to meet a prisoner from his country held in that state's prison on an extradition charge.

Come on, British media, DO SOMETHING ON THIS STORY! Don't leave it to me to report this first! I'm just a humble blogger.

Meanwhile legal challenges to the court decision not to release Ganic on bail continue, as do moves by the BH side to muster arguments on the substance of Serbia's extradition request. Serbia is still pulling together the documents it says it needs to support its case.

Ganic's renewed bail application may be heard later this week. 

Background over at Balkan Insight on Ganic's high-powered defence team, including Clare Montgomery who was part of Pinochet's defence team.

Is hosted by Mr Eugenides.

Linking to a lot of UK political stuff, plus this good piece about how the proliferation of new media outlets create closed sub-cultures:

The internet is an extension of the telephone network, and as such it's a two-way communication medium rather than a one-way broadcast medium. The internet allows people to answer back, in ways that the church pulpit and books and newspapers and TV and radio never allowed, or only residually allowed.

And this changes everything. It changes the game completely.

A fine article at Devil's Kitchen reminding us how New Zealand slashed socialism in a series of bold, strong moves (emphasis added):

It cost us twice as much to get a poorer result than we did 20 years previously with much less money. So we decided to rethink what we were doing here as well.

The first thing we did was to identify where the dollars were going that we were pouring into education. We hired international consultants (because we didn’t trust our own departments to do it), and they reported that for every dollar we were spending on education, 70 cents was being swallowed up by administration.

Once we heard this, we immediately eliminated all of the Boards of Education in the country. Every single school came under the control of a board of trustees elected by the parents of the children at that school, and by nobody else.

We gave schools a block of money based on the number of students that went to them, with no strings attached. At the same time, we told the parents that they had an absolute right to choose where their children would go to school. It is absolutely obnoxious to me that anybody would tell parents that they must send their children to a bad school.

We converted 4,500 schools to this new system all on the same day...

It will happen here too.

One day. When we decide to drive back government to sensible levels.

Bring it on.

A reader argues that I am underestimating the impact of Fox News in the USA:

Thus the numbers of people 'reached' in America are not the paltry 2.8 million you purport, but rather 80% of the total viewership for the day, 18,166,000, (again ridiculous, 20% of 18 million people did not tune into FOX news yesterday and spend the entire day watching it)...

So obviously many more people were one time show watchers tuning into an original program they wished to view, rather than spending their entire day watching a news channel on a non-news day.

I did not 'purport' anything. The figures I quoted were clearly describing 'prime time' viewership alone. That said, the ratings over a longer period of course stack up for Fox as for everyone else.

The media term for this is the cume. See how Arbitron defines it:

Major ratings products include cume (the cumulative number of unique listeners over a period), average quarter hour (AQH - the average number of people listening every 15 minutes), time spent listening, (TSL), and market breakdowns by demographic.

It is important to understand that the CUME only counts a listener once, whereas the AQH can count the same person multiple times, this is how to determine the TSL. For example, if you looked into a room and saw Fred and Jane, then 15 minutes later saw Fred with Sara. The Cume would be 3 (Fred, Jane, Sara) and the AQH would be 2. (an average of two people in the room in a given 15 minute period)

Which is why in fact CNN claim that their cume is greater than Fox's.

The point of my posting was to look at the sense behind the claim of a senior Democrat that four times as many viewers watch Fox as watch CNN. If the total numbers for both are relatively small, why if at all does that matter?

This piece supports my position, noting that back in 1969 the main evening US news channels would reach 40 million people (at a time when the US population was a lot smaller):

There's a growing perception that opinion news outlets like Fox and MSNBC drive the news agenda. Do they?

No. The state of the economy, the war in Afghanistan, whether swine flu is going to turn more deadly--these things drive the news. That perception may be there, but cable news is still a niche medium.

Fox's Bill O'Reilly has around 3.5 million people watching each night, or about 1% of American adults. That would get you canceled on broadcast television. The three nightly newscasts have about 20 million viewers, not 3.5 million.

What Fox clearly does is reinforce the sympathies and energies of a smallish number of conservative Americans. So what? It's a free country! Most other cable and network channels push in a more 'liberal' direction, far outnumbering Fox.

Where US conservatives do have an edge is with Talk Radio, with Rush Limbaugh reaching some 13.5 million listeners a week. But again, that is only two million per day on average.

The basic fact is that with the huge expansion of TV channels and Internet-based entertainment and information of the past couple of decades, fairly few Americans now watch TV for news and current affairs. Newspaper circulations are falling too.

Hence the vicious circle of those programmes (and newspapers) cutting reporters and so getting more and more shallow or even solely 'opinion-based' (ie making a loud and often silly noise) to try to keep up their ratings.

That trend is evident here in the UK too. See for example how the BBC lost my vote back in 1993 with its scandalously poor assessment of the attempted coup against President Yeltsin, which I watched at the Embassy in Moscow with gunfire echoing round the city in the background:

When I subsequently took up with a senior BBC personality the BBC's dismal, dishonest reporting at the height of the crisis he just shrugged, saying that that sort of dramatic reporting boosted ratings and was what people wanted to hear these days.

In short, if the Democrats want to blame something for their woes, maybe the right target is not Fox News but rather their own policies?

A bracing visionary view at Edge of how the Internet is transforming everything, by David Gelernter.

Interesting intro:

Take a look at the photos from the recent Edge annual dinner and you will find the people who are re-writing global culture, and also changing your business, and, your head.

What do Evan Williams (Twitter), Larry Page (Google), Tim Berners-Lee (World Wide Web Consortium), Sergey Brin (Google), Bill Joy (Sun), Salar Kamangar (Google), Keith Coleman (Google Gmail), Marissa Mayer (Google), Lori Park (Google), W. Daniel Hillis (Applied Minds), Nathan Myhrvold (Intellectual Ventures), Dave Morin (formerly Facebook), Michael Tchao (Apple iPad), Tony Fadell (Apple/iPod), Jeff Skoll (formerly eBay), Chad Hurley (YouTube), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) have in common?

All are software engineers or scientists.

So what's the point? It's a culture. Call it the algorithmic culture. To get it, you need to be part of it, you need to come out of it. Otherwise, you spend the rest of your life dancing to the tune of other people's code.

Just look at Europe where the idea of competition in the Internet space appears to focus on litigation, legislation, regulation, and criminalization...

Gelernter:

Nowness is one of the most important cultural phenomena of the modern age: the western world's attention shifted gradually from the deep but narrow domain of one family or village and its history to the (broader but shallower) domains of the larger community, the nation, the world.

The cult of celebrity, the importance of opinion polls, the decline in the teaching and learning of history, the uniformity of opinions and attitudes in academia and other educated elites — they are all part of one phenomenon.

Nowness ignores all other moments but this. In the ultimate Internet culture, flooded in nowness like a piazza flooded in sea water, drenched in a tropical downpour of nowness, everyone talks alike, dresses alike, thinks alike.

... As I wrote at the start of this piece, no moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than "now." As we learn more about now, we know less about then.

The Internet increases the supply of information hugely, but the capacity of the human mind not at all.  (Some scientists talk about artificially increasing the power of minds and memories — but then they are no longer talking about human beings. They are discussing some new species we know nothing about. And in this field, we would be fools to doubt our own ignorance.)  

The effect of nowness resembles the effect of light pollution in large cities, which makes it impossible to see the stars. A flood of information about the present shuts out the past...

Read the whole thing. Clever.

Here is what looks like the original British Arrest Warrant for Ejup Ganic (click on the Arrest Warrant.jpg link)

It contains a seeming serious error (emphasis added), saying that Ganic is accused in a category 2 territory, namely Serbia of the commission of an offence the conduct of which occurred in that territory ...

Is this a mistake of some sort based on the information Serbia has put forward?

Or have bemused Brits in the Westminster Magistrates Court failed to grasp some of the basic points of the collapse of Yugoslavia - annoying but possibly justifiable?

Or is Serbia deliberately claiming (to get its jurisdictional credentials established) that at that point the independence of Bosnia had not been generally recognised by the international community (Bosnia and Herzegovina joined the UN only on 22 May 1992 - my birthday), and so Sarajevo was still part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and thus within a single legal space, of which Serbia is now the sole remaining heir (insofar as there is one)?

Or is there some Serbia implicit link to the Karadzicistic idea that Sarajevo by that stage already had been divided into two parts, ie 'Serb Sarajevo' and the rest?

If either of the latter two, blimey.

If (more likely?) it is some sort of footling mistake, I would not suspect that the nature of the mistake would make the whole arrest to be so improper as to derail the extradition request, if (if) the issue of where the alleged crimes took place is not in itself a substantive issue (eg for jurisdictional reasons)

Meanwhile here I am on Radio Free Europe talking about the case, as translated into Bosnian/Serbian.

If you don't speak that, forget using the Google Translate button to get it into English - you'll still have no idea what I said! It seems to think I discussing pilgrims.

At the risk of boring everyone, here is an excellent interview with Jovan Divjak about the Dobrovoljacka St killings and the politics of it all now.

It's in Bosnian/Serbian (not as Google says Croatian), but if you use the Google Translate button you'll get more than enough of it in somewhat strangled English to get the essence of what he is saying.

Key points:

• Divjak insists that there was no formally organised attack, but rather attacks from a number of different units with unfortunately no central command possible - a certain chaos
• But (Note: as an honest soldier) he accepts that whereas the Bosniacs were defending themselves, there were 'proceedings' not in accordance with the Geneva Convention.
• "Of course you ask yourself, who did the shooting?. It's known who did it" (Note: the Google translation gets this key point 100% wrong!)
• Ganic at the time was indeed substituting Izetbegovic as the most senior Bosniac commander. But who precisely ordered what should be determined by the Prosecutor's Office, not the media.
• As and when the whole affair comes to trial, Divjak's own statements will be judged to show how far and in what respects he himself bore responsibility  
• Tensions between Bosnia and now Serbi are as high now as they were when the war ended, with Serbia in particular unable to face up to the way Karadzic was supported from Belgrade. Facts clearly established at the Hague Tribunal are being ignored for propaganda purposes.
• But the Bosniacs too are unwilling to accept massacres committed by their side.
• Politicians on all sides have an interest in keeping up tension as the only way to advance their own plans; see for example former Serbian PM Kostunica on TV blaming the Muslims for everything which happened

Gripping stuff, for those of us able and willing to follow all these Balkan tensions in any detail...

The wider point is this.

With the possible exception of Slovenia, a tricky case in itself for reasons going back deep into WW2, no former Yugoslav republic has found a way to strike a way between defensive exclusivist 'national'/nationalist/ethnic politics and a different inclusive pluralism.

Put to one side the fascinating sociological fact that this is the dismal result of decades of intense central communist propaganda in favour of Brotherhood and Unity - something those insisting on 'ever-closer union' within the EU might want to think about.

The simple fact is that all the different communities across former Yugoslavia can not imagine ethnic disarmament - moving to a situation where issues are looked at on their merits, rather than in terms of which community 'somehow' will gain an edge.

In fact this problem has a lot of disarmament game theory in it:

Of course we are ready to disarm - we are good Europeans! But given our long history of being brutalised, it is only fair that the other sides have to put down some weapons first to show their sincerity

Haha. A typical banal Balkan trick. They are saying that we should put some weapons down to make it easier for them to attack us again. They must be planning new attacks. Let's get a few more weapons, just in case

See?! We told you so. We make a fair offer aimed at achieving disarmament - and they start getting new weapons! How can we trust them?

There appears to be no way out of this centuries-long psychological and immoral, suspicicious morass. One name for it is the Sakic-Milosevic Syndrome.

Is the problem especially acute in Serbia? Arguably yes.

The good news there is that as much the largest former Yugoslav republic Serbia necessarily has a different, 'larger' sort of democracy and democratic potential, which has to incorporate different ethnic communities and does so pretty well for day-to-day purposes.

However, at the level of state policy there is an unhappy tension between lumpen 'nationalist' ambition and modern pluralism. A fine article by Srdja Popovic describes how that confusion affects the main force for change in Serbia, the Democratic Party (emphasis added):

... when I saw their program, I realized that it incorporated two contradictory parts. The first part advocated widely defined democratic values, freedoms, civil rights, market economy, and the other part was nationalism in its darkest form. I would sign the first part in an instant, and the second part I wouldn’t even dream of signing.

And now, looking back, I see how even then they were impressed by the success of the Right and of Milosevic’s supposedly leftist party which pursued right-wing policies. So they realized that they would remain isolated and alone if they too didn’t give their contribution to nationalism. 

The party was constantly being divided by this built-in contradiction, and the result is Tadic’s slogan – both Kosovo and Europe. He is responding to the contradictory demands which they themselves made at the very beginning.

This explains the historical reconciliation narrative, because they now want to reconcile the two irreconcilable parts of their program. They want to do it on a personal level, on a governmental level, on the state level.

... But it can’t get us anywhere, it is self-paralyzing, because it is confined by the two conflicting forces which it contains. It is a void, and this void is wasting the precious little reformatory energy this society has.

All that spills over into Bosnia too, whose self-absorbed leaders (admittedly operating in a bizarre constitutional framework imposed by Dick Holbrooke) have blown their opportunity to build a successful modern economy.

Which is why I am sitting here today writing about a dirty little massacre 18 years ago, one squalid episode in a far wider series of horrors which few if any leaders in the region really want to accept as a whole.

Robin Harris, former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, lambasts at NRO the way judicial processes are being used and (he says) abused in the UK for foreign or other political purposes:

The British authorities allowed themselves to become dupes of judicial manipulation, and it will be hard to claw back towards common sense. Serbia is a signatory to the European Convention on Extradition. This should mean — but does not — that its courts conduct their business fairly. No one, knowing the circumstances, could imagine that Ganic would receive a fair trial in Belgrade. Yet Britain has limited its own options, by legislation passed in 2003 that reduces the scope for ministers to intervene to stop such cases.

Any present or former politician, high official, or soldier from any of the countries involved in the wars accompanying the breakup of Yugoslavia is now at risk of arrest on a politically fabricated charge if he or she comes to Britain. But one cannot stop there. Leading figures from many Western countries have also been involved in Yugoslavia’s wars, particularly in Kosovo in 1999. A Serbian court could issue warrants against these figures, too, and the British police will, as we have seen, unquestioningly act on them.

So Gordon Brown’s assurances are less than reassuring. It is not only private groups that manipulate international justice. So can states with ill-functioning judicial systems and little respect for veracity or equity.

The abuses inherent in universal jurisdiction will, therefore, continue to manifest themselves in acute form in Britain, unless radical reform is undertaken. In the meantime, Heathrow arrival gates could usefully be marked: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”

Fine (more or less), except that it does not take us far.

Either we make extradition arrangements or we don't.

If we do, there are three general choices:

• let the courts decide, according to firm criteria which respect human rights and as far as possible common sense (ie as far as possible 'neutral' and unpolitical decisions)
• let Ministers decide, ditto (ie as far as possible reasonable decisions which weigh the UK public interest in an openly political way, and for which Ministers are publicly accountable)
• some sort of messy hybrid (what we now have)

Then there is a quite separate list of questions:

• Do we have 'easier' extradition arrangements for countries we regard as capable of running a fair trial (ie relatively few)?
• If we do, how much easier should they be? Is the aim to get foreign feuding out of our courts asap?
• How far if at all should we (courts or Ministers) look at the substance of the request and the background circumstances?
• Do we have no extradition arrangments with countries abusing human rights (ie most of them)?

The problem with having easier extradition arrangements for some ostensibly respectable countries (including EU and would-be EU partners) is that even they may allow political murky considerations to drive extradition requests. See this Ganic case. 

The problem with having no extradition arrangements with 'bad' countries is that any gangster or corrupt oligarch from that country can make a beeline to the UK and hide behind those laws and/or 'human rights.

No clearly good answer here, in either theory or practice. Reasonable people will disagree as to which extradition requests (and processes and principles) are well founded, and which are a scandal.

Robin Harris appears to advocate some sort of reserve trump card for Ministers to step in and stop any extradition or other such proceedings they dislike for foreign or other policy reasons.

That's one way of doing it. But it opens another risk, namely that decisions made by Ministers in such circumstances will be politically motivated and capricious and therefore open to legal challenge - hard to maintain any sort of consistent principle one way or the other.

In any case, there looks to be no way to stop the UK courts having full-blown legal battles over the politics of other countries. Since even if we have a 'let Ministers decide' rule, decisions will be challenged in the courts on any number of procedural and substantive grounds. See the Pinochet cases - nice earners for the lawyers involved, all at UK taxpayers' expense.

As for Ejup Ganic, it may all be over next week if the Serbian government fail to put together a convincing dossier which establishes enough of a case to answer to force the matter into a substantive extradition process.

If they do produce enough evidence to achieve that outcome, the whole saga could become really very complicated. If not dramatic.

Is it money you have now plus money you know you'll have, or are sure you'll have?

Is it costs you have now plus costs you know you'll have or are sure you'll have?

What about expected costs which don't in fact arise or are deferred? How to account for that 'saving'?

What if you spend that 'saving', then persuade yourself that you can make a similar saving next month and spend that too?

Which time period 'counts'? Is it OK to run up unaffordable debts in Period A, then simply roll them over into Period B and proclaim budget discipline?

Welcome to the dark world of 'gaming the budget window', a core feature of Obamacare. And a purposeful further step down the Road to Ruin?

As usual, Keith Hennessey explains.

What really happened in chaotic Sarajevo in and around Dobrovoljacka Street on 3 May 1992?

The range of views appears to be broadly as follows:

Core Serbia/'Serb' Claim:   perfidious massacre of JNA soldiers attempting to withdraw from Sarajevo under UN colours as per an agreement duly reached with the Bosniac leadership, with senior Bosniac leaders including Ejup Ganic personally responsible either directly or implicitly. Slam dunk war crime.

Bosniac Claim Version 1:   understandable formal military response to previous JNA brutality and kidnap of President Izetbegovic - JNA themselves broke the agreement under which they could withdraw. That said, not known who gave the orders to shoot. No war crime - chaos of war, which Serbia started

Bosniac Claim Version 2:   spontaneous, irregular but more or less understandable/justifiable attack by Bosniac irregulars responding to JNA aggression the previous day. No formal orders given. No war crime - just a mess

Bosniac Claim Version 3:  a fully legitimate attack on a fair military target: at worst the Bosniacs were in 'technical' breach of a ceasefire unfairly imposed on them as a condition for getting back their kidnapped leader. Even if orders were given, as it was a proper military attack the issue is of no significance. No issue here folks, so move along

* * * * * 

The Serbian claim lies behind the Serbia government's latest attempt to secure Ganic's extradition. But what level of hard evidence will they need to put forward (a) to make a convincing and finally winning case for extradition now, and (b) to secure a conviction if the issue ever gets to trial in Serbia?

The Death of Yugoslavia videos suggest different version of Bosniac Versions 1 and 2, as articulated by Ganic himself and others. For a good, detailed account of the "it was all a mess" approach, read this interview with Jovan Divjak, one of the few people in the whole Yugoslav collapse disaster to have kept a reputation for integrity:

Dnevni Avaz in Sarajevo reports that the UK court has ordered that Ejup Ganic stay in prison for a further week, apparently to give Serbia more time to present evidence against him for the Dobrovoljacka St massacre in 1992.

A protest demonstration is to be held outside the British and Serbian Embassies in Sarajevo.

Here in the UK the absurd and preposterous media silencefulness about this story is truly terrific.

As far as I can see:

Nothing more on the Telegraph website since 2 March.

Nothing more on the Guardian website since 1 March (Note: I mentioned this to the Guardian's Diplomatic Editor last night).

Nothing more on the Times website since 3 March.

Nothing more on the Independent website since 1 March.

Good grief.

A former European leader has been arrested and detained on a Balkan war crimes extradition rap, involving an attack on a UN convoy. The London court blunders its own procedures and brings the wrong prisoner to court. The issue stirs controversy and adds to Bosnia's already sharp political divisions.

Is all this and much more not in some way maybe ... newsworthy?

UK/World News today: Should Carla Bruni have Worn a Bra?

Duh. Of course not.

Over at the latest Crawford Diplomatic Despatch:

It all boils down to a profound infantilisation of public life. Government has turned into feckless dim-witted parents who treat their children like spoiled brats. The children themselves duly morph into something neurotic, angry and sly.

To win the public’s loathsome brattish affections and get re-elected, the parents offer endless sweeties, only to be aghast when the brats start to think that this is how things must be – even when there is no more money for sweets, and their own teeth start to rot from all that sugar.

The door-bell rings. It’s the bailiff:

Nice islands you have over there. Pity you can’t afford them any more…

I have just given a short interview to Radio Free Europe in Sarajevo about the Ganic problem.

The interviewer asked a question about the abuse of UK courts for political purposes. I pointed out that there are two completely different issues here, which may (understandably) be merging into one in the public mind:

• extradition requests filed by other states, which may or may not involve foreign leaders (Ganic situation): these are played out under the relevant detailed Extradition legislation
• private prosecutions (eg for war crimes) of visiting foreign leaders attempted by UK-based 'activists' as politically motivated lawfare. See the recent Israel episode. That was what Gordon Brown has written about today. 

I also pointed out that HM Government took war crimes issues very seriously - see eg the first action in Bosnia by NATO to round up ICTY indictees in 1997, which had been fatuously denounced in Sarajevo as a pro-Serb ploy even though the SAS killed a leading Bosnia Serb indictee in the process.

So (I said) it was not surprising that a British court confronted with some evidence that the Bosnian leader concerned had played a direct part in the killing of up to 40 people in a UN convoy might take the case very seriously. If it went to substantive hearings a rare battle would ensue, with top lawyers arguing the extradition case on its merits. I added that it remained to be seen whether the Bosnian application for Mr Ganic's extradition would help or hinder his case - were they really going to present him as a war-crimes suspect..? 

My Google Spam is doing a noble job in heading off lots of emails from somewhere or other purporting to issue diplomas:

BECAUSE YOU DESERVE IT! Is your lack of a degree holding you back from career advancement? Are you having difficulty finding employment in your field of interest because you don’t have the paper to back it up – even though you are qualified? If you are looking for a fast and effective solution, we can help! Call us right now for your customized diploma...

Isn't that wonderful?

You have failed by normal means to get a respectable honest qualification. That's holding you back. 

But gosh, you sure do deserve one!

Does your future employer deserve to be taken in by these instant diplomas?

Update: Balkan media are reporting this afternoon that Ganic's request to be released on bail has been refused by the court in London.

B92 says that he may remain detained until 14 March when the deadline for submitting relevant documents expires, but wonders whether there may be a problem with Belgrade sending in all the paperwork...

* * * * *

Dnevni Avaz in Sarajevo reports today that Sanela Jenkins ("a Sarajevo woman married to a rich British banker") has paid over £200,000 as bail to secure Ejup Ganic's release from prison, expected later today.

Also that the BH Prosecutor has now sent an extradition request to the British authorities asking that Ganic be transferred to Bosnia: The Prosecutor considers itself solely competent for processing war crimes committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina for which BH citizens are suspected.

Fascinating. If this one gets into a full court case, how will Serbia and BH each argue the case that (a) Dobrovoljacka Street was a suspected war crime, and (b) that Ganic needs to be prosecuted for it, and (c) that he needs to be extradited accordingly?

Is this a wise move by the Bosnians? Can not Serbia use it to argue that the BH application is a smokescreen to enable Ganic to escape any serious investigation of the crime, since otherwise why have the Bosnians done nothing about it in nearly 20 years?

The Daily Telegraph weighs in on Ejup Ganic:

Bosnia has demanded his release and supporters claimed Britain had allowed itself to be used as pawn in the long-running battle between the two former Yugoslav nations.

The Telegraph quotes both an unnamed spokesman for Lady Thatcher and Robin Harris, her former speechwriter:

"She is deeply concerned. It is a mark of her regard for him that he is one of the relatively limited number of people she has met recently. She is worried about the precedents that these arrest warrants represent to visiting statesmen to London and absolutely urges a quick resolution."

Robin Harris, Lady Thatcher's former speech writer, said: "The idea that Serbia can now just actually indict and seek the extradition to Serbia of people who were, in fact, of course defending the local population against Serb-inspired aggression as long ago as 1992 on Bosnian rather than Serbian territory; and that actually such a request should be even given any kind of proper consideration at all by the British courts is to me quite astonishing,"

They also cite me(!) as saying that Ganic would joke "that his career was doomed because he had been born in Serbia". Which of course is not what I have said: how could I, when he was a leading member of the Bosnian Presidency and having an evidently undoomed career?

Idiots. Sigh.

The big policy question raised by Lady Thatcher is a good one. What are the limits of freedom?

On the one hand, we want to be open to foreigners (including political leaders) visiting here both as tourists and on business.

On the other, we do not want foreigners coming here to escape justice when they are wanted in their own countries for alleged crimes.

Plus we do not want unjust regimes to insist that foreigners on UK soil be sent back home to face trumped-up charges.

Plus we do not want to annoy generally friendly foreign states whose ideas of democracy are, hem, less sophisticated than ours by implying that they are incapable of running a fair trial.

Plus we do not want to be the world's default option for anyone wanting a job and free benefits and claiming to be an asylum seeker.

Nor do we want our legal system to be abused through politically motivated 'lawfare' by 'activists' issuing arrest warrants for foreign leaders they don't like.

Oh, and we also want to see all war crimes suspects brought to justice.

And we do not want to waste our time trying to fathom out in nano-level which countries are capable of running a fair trial or not, in general and in particular cases. Since almost none are (we suspect).

Which is why we want to make it fairly easy to extradite people to especially trustworthy international state partners in the EU and beyond, whose motives and ability to dispense justice are deemed (by us) to be (more or less) above suspicion. That means you, Serbia - and Bosnia and Herzegovina too!

Not to forget that we want to keep politics out of the courts.

Except that we do not want the courts taking decisions for tedious narrow legal reasons which could screw us in our international dealings.

Hence we have an odd hybrid system with detailed rules laid down for how extraditions are to be run by the courts but with ultimate authority lying with the Home Secretary (whose own criteria for stopping an extradition approved by the courts are tightly defined).

And did I mention the Human Rights Act?

Phew. Does anyone care to rank these policy considerations in priority order?

No. I thought not.

Mr Ganic's case ticks a number of these boxes simultaneously, which is why the line coming from Robin Harris is open to question.

Plus huffing and puffing that it is wrong to look at extraditing someone 'who was only defending his country' is a perverse reading of what happened, namely an attack on a convoy including UN vehicles which was trying to leave Sarajevo under a deal agreed by the Bosnian leadership including Mr Ganic himself. Watch the videos.

This one falls clearly within the war crime - case to answer category. A point not lost on Bakir Izetbegovic (son of former Bosnian President Izetbegovic who himself was in that convoy). Here he is quoted on B92 from Belgrade:

Neki zločin se tamo jeste desio, al' ga sasvim sigurno nije učinio Ganić, niti je odgovoran Ejup Ganić za njega. Jeste tamo bilo stradanja ljudi, ali će tužilac svoje reći...

Some sort of crime did happen there, but for sure Ganic did not commit it, nor is Ejup Ganic responsible for it. Yes people were massacred there, but the prosecutor will have his say...

Meanwhile as expected the question quickly appears of how far BH-level institutions might weigh in on Ganic's behalf if there is no consensus on the issue.

Republika Srpska leader Dodik has argued that it is 'unacceptable' for BH official money to be made available to help get Ganic out on bail, and has accused the BH Prosecutor's office of ignoring the Dobrovoljacka St massacre and other crimes against Serbs for political reasons.

Back in Sarajevo Bosniac and Bosnian Croat politicians are variously calling the whole business a scandal if not unfriendly act by Belgrade, and demanding that Belgrade focus on arresting General Mladic rather than prosecuting Ganic (Note: good point).

And Ganic's daughter is claiming that the British authorities are abusing her father's human rights by denying him contact with his family and the Bosnian Ambassador in London.

In short, a gripping foreign policy gužva.

Update:  Bishop Hill (being a lot smarter than I am) has found a way to save the key sound-clip. See also the interesting comments the posting has prompted.

* * * * *

Quick! Listen before it disappears down the iPlayer memory hole.

BBC presenter Peter Allen on Radio 5 live Drive on 1 March, talking to Angela Dingwall from a Scottish ski resort about this year's heavy snow.

After their chatting about the scale of this year's snow, he asks her if she puts it all down to 'yer global warming'.

She says "No, I don't believe in global warming I'm afraid... It comes and goes."

Peter Allen is heard to go 'tsk': "You're allowed to say that but I'm not" (All laugh)

Here, starting at 0.28 minutes in.

Of course, it's all in good humour. But the sort of jokes one cracks - especially live on the radio - maybe say something?